Persons and businesses may implement a variety of strategies to protect valuable data. For example, persons and business may implement cluster computing to access data. Hosts in a cluster may each access underlying data. If one of the hosts fails, then application processing may failover to another host in the cluster. Cluster computing may thereby increasing availability of valuable data.
Similarly, persons and businesses may also implement data mirroring or replication to provide underlying data. Data mirroring or replication may automatically create a copy of designated data. Data mirroring or replication may thereby protect data by creating a redundant backup. In the case of a disaster at one cluster site, data from a replicated copy at another site may be recovered.
Hosts in a cluster may communicate with each other through various means. For example, when hosts share underlying data, the hosts may communicate with each other to coordinate access and locking of the data to preserve consistency of the data. The shared data may include metadata in a cluster virtual file system. Host communication may involve an additional layer of dedicated networking infrastructure that allows direct or substantially direct communication between hosts. The dedicated networking infrastructure may be separate from communication infrastructure through which hosts communicate with an underlying data store.